Plea for comments

I need to submit a proposal to a major publication tomorrow. I have had to rush it off. Any comments would be appreciated.

How is it that the American dream suddenly morphed into a nightmare? The subprime crisis is a symptom of something larger and far more dangerous. Even the meltdown of Wall Street is a symptom of something larger and even more threatening. Without extreme care, the intended cure is likely to make matters worse. Papering over a crisis, even with a trillion dollar bailout, may temporarily eliminate the symptoms, perhaps even making the economy look healthy again, but the underlying problems are almost certain to break out again in a more virulent form.

A rational response to the crisis requires recognizing the deeper, systemic dimensions of the problem. On the most superficial level, the public face of problem was a group of people buying houses they could not afford. This perspective is misleading, especially because many of the loans were to people who were already homeowners or small-time speculators who were looking to flip houses.

Like a Russian nesting doll, another face is below the surface: predatory lenders, who were pushing deceptive loans that could never be repaid. Pulling away these predatory lenders exposes a more complex presence: the great banking institutions now on the public dole. These supposedly respectable businesses, protective of their public face, do not allow their corporate names to be used by the predatory lenders, but they represent a very profitable component of their businesses. At the next levels, first a dysfunctional financial system appears and, then, something more abstract — a political movement fanatically committed to deregulation, which allowed the whole financial system to go haywire.

Recent scrutiny has exposed most of these actors, but even deeper forces have gone unnoticed. To get a handle of these forces requires looking back at the pattern of crisis and response over many decades. Since comparisons of the current crisis with the Great Depression have become commonplace, that period may be a good place to start.

The Depression of the 1930s had disastrous human consequences, but it made the economy stronger in the long run. In effect, the depression drew much of the poison from the system. It swept away outdated, inefficient, and obsolete businesses, plant, and equipment. Under extraordinary market pressure, business found ways to improve efficiency. Finally, the Depression wiped out a great deal of debt, while New Deal legislation allowed unions to lift wages. The World War II economy built up considerable wealth in the U.S. while the economies of international competitors were left in ruins. This constellation of forces left business and the public able to purchase goods and services once employment recovered.

Shortly after the war ended, the U.S. enjoyed what economists call the Golden Age, because of the extraordinary economic performance of the time. Business came to expect that the experience of the Depression had taught government how to make those good times last forever. Obviously, they did not.

By the late 1960s, falling profits created enormous dissatisfaction for business. Both business and the public tended to hold the Democrats responsible for the faltering economy. In the decades that followed, the Democrats managed to elect only two presidents, both of whom governed like traditional Republicans, while the Republicans became increasingly ruthless about promoting business interests. The underlying obsession of both parties was to resurrect the profitability of the Golden Age.

I will tell the story of the people and policies that set out to recreate the economic performance of the Golden Age. The reader will see how, instead of a Golden Age, they gave the world a jerry-rigged Gilded Age — one in which the gilding covered up an increasingly dilapidated economy. Profits still rose, approaching their pre-Depression peak, but their recovery marked deeper problems.

Normally, one would expect healthy profits to be a payoff from a productive economic structure, based on intelligent investments in plant, equipment, and a well-trained workforce. Instead, the improvement in profits reflected a combination of cheap labor (real hourly wages peaked in 1972), deregulation, low interest rates, and financial manipulation. The driving force of this new Gilded Age was credit rather than income for the majority of workers. Recurrent crises should have signaled the need for fundamental change. Instead, government and business chose to treat the symptoms.

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2 comments so far

mark hansen
on
October 23, 2008

world war 2 and the build up to it were what ended the depression so far as i can tell.
however by the time the war was over we had used up about 200 years worth of natural resources(no, i don’t have any statistics to show you) and we can’t do that twice.